“For tech companies right now the 2 constraints are (1) hiring top people and (2) having enough [real estate] for their forecast-ed growth.

It may be a statement of the obvious but with the tech stock market where it is right now, projections of revenue growth and staff growth are very high and linked together. i.e. you cannot tell your growth story to the equity market if you cannot control enough [real estate] in job centers.

If you are in the SF office business, you have to buy into this equation, because that is what there is in SF — there is no diversified tenant mix for hi rises like there is in NYC or London. It is a concentrated investment and you are essentially a supplier to a narrow swatch of social-networking industry.

The big question is – or will be – when the stock market in tech falters – what happens to hiring, growth projections and all the excess space that is being defensively leased right now.
There is, conservatively, 5 MIL sq ft of office space under lease / LOI etc that will not be “occupied” on initial tenant occupancy in SF downtown / soma. call it shadow vacancy even if it is not on sublet market.

Is it different from last time because twitter and square and airbnb and uber are long term different from b2b or webvan or scient or yahoo or jdsu etc.? Time will tell.

Right now the answer is the one you want it to be, and clearly 95% of investors in [commercial real estate] want it to be “different this time.” But I would really, really hedge an all tech portfolio.”

Last week, LinkedIn shares plummeted over 40 percent. And with a recovery day now closed, LinkedIn is currently trading at $110 per share, roughly 35 percent below the price when the company inked its growth-story lease.

And a back of the envelope calculation would suggest that up to two-thirds of the company’s 9,000 employees, a third of which have been added since 2014, are effectively out of the money, or even underwater, on any options or purchased shares.

On a positive note, when LinkedIn inked its 222 Second Street lease, the average office rent in San Francisco was around $57 a square foot, roughly 20 percent lower than today. But that’s still an annual lease payment of at least $25 million a year for the building, or a significant amount of previously committed tech space which could suddenly become available.

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Comments from “Plugged-In” Readers

Do the majority of LinkedIn employees even get options? As I understand it for publicly traded companies only executes now receive options (basically, those that received qualified options still receive qualified options), but the majority if not all of the employees who used to get non qualified options now get stock grants instead. This is due to some tax related rulings that the IRS made where companies need to pay taxes on the market value of the options given out.

depends on the size of the company. many young companies give options to everyone, even years after they are public. many mid-size established but growing companies give a combo of RSUs and options. Most large older companies with little growth give only RSUs

This post is a lot of speculation! So far, LinkedIn hasn’t given any indication of giving up the new space. When I talked with an employee about this some time back, the rationale for the new space involved consolidating their offices in SF (2 separate locations, plus future SF-based acquisitions). On a smaller level, some teams also wanted to move to SF from the South Bay.

Certain tech companies are here to stay, ones that have really radically revised their market dymanics, like Uber and AirBNB. They are not pie in the sky fool’s games like Webvan, they are generating real revenue with innovative and heretofore inaccessible methodologies. But yes there are plenty of lame unicorns who will probably shake out and die out in the next few years. Maybe even twitter, everyone likes to tweet but where’s the money in it?

It seems like so many tech companies are aimed at providing unneeded services to a slice of the urban upper middle class. Ephemeral services. Like, it is just so very very onerous to have to actually hand a credit card to a sales clerk when I instead can wave my cell phone at a machine reader! Sure, it’s a cute service, but is it worth the amazing amount of capital thrown at it?

Credit card transactions are paid through an interchange system. I once worked on a project to cut one middle man for a smallish local CC processor (<1000 high value point-of-sales). The ~0.5% he saved amounted in something to the range of $1M/year. The streamlined transactions matter a lot to capture more merchants and this can be reflected in significant profits.

There were a lot of inefficiencies. A new player can manage to save on:

– In person Marketing (people jut sign up directly)
– In person set-up (easy and self-explanatory)
– Data processing (communication goes directly to a larger entity dealing directly with CC issuers)
– Back end processing happening directly at this new processor. Almost no human involvement.
– Scale effect that a company with 1000s of PoS can have in the interchange fee

It’s all about streamlining, saving at every step, doing economies of scale.

Beware the hype machine my friend. Those product categories, on demand cars and rooms, are here to stay, but companies can rise or fall for many reasons while product categories march on.

Webvan’s a great example. You have plenty of companies offering grocery delivery today, but Webvan the company is completely defunct.

Neither AirBnb nor Uber have unique product offerings. Personally, I’ve found AirBnb quite inferior to say VRBO. Uber, I feel, has a best of breed iOS app. But I find nowdays that nearly all of the drivers I get work for both Uber and Lyft. So the actual service I receive is essentially a commodity.

Both Uber and AirBNB burn cash, have sky high valuations and have nothing that really makes a customer “sticky”. i.e. Switching from Windows in the old days was incredibly hard for an organization, so customers essentially got stuck with a high barrier to exit. Switching phones is irritating with apps and media purchases being somewhat tied to a platform. But if I Uber one day, then Lyft the next it’s no skin off my back.

Currently they both have access to huge amounts of funding. But that money is no gift. Investors will expect quite a bit in return. Webvan was very well funded in its day.

And technology marches on. Building Uber might have been a technological feat in 2009, but in 5 years college kids will be throwing together car share apps as school projects.

Again, look at Webvan. Might have been high tech for it’s time. But now Safeway!! has grocery delivery. And I really doubt that the top coders from MIT are lining up for IT jobs at Safeway.

Webvan actually lives on…one obscure bit of tech trivia is that Amazon acquired all the Webvan assets, systems and IP, so in many ways Webvan was just rebranded as Amazon Direct. Webvan simply got ahead of itself from a cash burn and build-out perspective as the tech funding market froze in 2001…but as Amazon has now proven, it was always a great idea.

So…other than stock price fluctuations, do we have any indication companies and downsizing their real estate foot print? I have read some companies are subletting more, but it seems like the market is just reaching a plateau.

The real signal would be developers delaying or putting projects on hold. I’m not too worried. Yet.

In a down-turn, would you expect cash-rich companies to try to stem losses and hang on longer, or to continue splurging like there’s no tomorrow? If you expect the latter, please mention the school where you got your business degree, so we can give credit where credit is due. if the former, what will the effect be on local RE? Isn’t that the important question to people whose livelihood is tied to RE? Or is it better to whistle past the graveyard?

If its true there is 5 million square feet of defensively leased space in SF that could present a problem.

How? Once square footage is built there’s no problem. The “problem” might be lower than highest in the country leasing rates? Ouch, big problem. We might have to deal with companies other than tech moving back.

The problem is that many other companies have left the area because the cost of living, driven primarily by the cost of housing, has skyrocketed. RE prices are very sticky on the way down, for many reasons, one being that RE is an long-term asset and not merely a price-discovering commodity. Other sectors aren’t going to rush in to fill the vaccuum until RE costs make sense, i.e. until mean reversion brings costs more in line with other urban centers.

This is why many of us have been screaming about the gutting of PDR space in SF: it guts stable,well-paying working class jobs and puts all the city’s economic eggs in one speculative basket. Millions of square feet of workspace dependent on ephemeral disruptive-on-demand-leading-edge-scalable-cross-platform-cloud-based-pizza-delivery apps that a teenager in New Delhi could write in a few weeks. What could possibly go wrong?

Relatively few companies moved out of town. Many of those that did moved to Oakland, which frankly helps the region. I suppose there has been a long term drain of jobs at Schwab and Wells and a few other HQ firms which have “right sized” by expanding back office and some other functions outside of the Bay Area, but frankly that’s been going on since the 80’s anyway. Screaming about PDR space does relatively little to preserve anything.

Not to mention the regulation and that AirBnb and Uber will have to grapple with moving forward. Airbnb is just a platform but fighting against all the regulation. It’s no different than an online travel agency with less supply and less revenue per transaction and more regulation to fight moving forward. But other than that it totally worth bizillions.

It’s kind of sad, but I walked past there this weekend and was actually impressed that it got past planning. Isn’t that the building where the windows aren’t flat on the surface but are at an angle? I was surprised that planning didn’t force them to be just flat. By our standards, that qualifies as edgy.